The eye's symbolic standing was fixed by scripture in a single sentence: the eye is the lamp of the body, so that the whole body is full of light or darkness as the eye is sound or evil. The saying assumes the ancient theory in which sight streams out from the eye like lamplight, and it made the eye the organ of moral as much as optical clarity. Around it stands the older and darker folklore of the evil eye, the glance that harms, warded off across the Mediterranean and Near East with blue beads and amulets to this day, and the all seeing eye of divine oversight, painted in the temples of Egypt as the Eye of Horus and on the ceilings of baroque churches alike.
The dream handbooks read eyes as what they are, the dreamer's access to the world: clear sight toward understanding and good fortune, dimmed or lost sight toward the loss of what one depends on, blindness as the great deprivation. The reported modern forms keep the pattern, eyes that will not open, sight that blurs at the crucial moment, the figure whose eyes are wrong.
The psychological traditions read dream eyes toward awareness itself: what the dreamer can and cannot bear to look at, who is looking at the dreamer, and the difference between seeing and being seen. Insight, that school's favourite word, is the eye's metaphor already. The readings are the traditions' own; the image's authority is as old as the lamp.